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Tuesday, March 23, 2010

The dreaded quadruple boss.

Final bosses going through several versions without the opportunity to save or heal in between is nothing new. I remember Ultimecia from Final Fantasy VIII taking me several hours of fighting, though I was seriously under leveled for the encounter. These boss gauntlets are less common right in the middle of the game, especially right after picking up a new character that hasn't even been used yet. White Knight Chronicles pulled a rather unfair move last night, stringing together four separate bosses with no break. While it did me the kindness of healing the team between each battle, the final fight forced me to go it alone with a character who I had equipped but never used. Ordinarily this would not be a problem, but this game does not use a shared inventory system between characters, so while this poor slob had a nice new spear and armor, I had not given him any items with which to heal himself. It was a close one, but I still managed to lose and I have to do them all again. This also means that it will be getting a day's break to cool things off. I hate redoing things, especially when the failure wasn't really my fault.

Replaying an entire game is something that I will never really understand. Part of enjoying a game for me is not knowing exactly what is going to happen next. This sense of discovery is entirely lost on a second (or third) play through. Even games that are designed to be played through multiple times hold no interest for me once the story is done. I hear of people taking a trip through a game once a year or re-installing Deus Ex just because someone mentioned the name and all I see is time wasted that could have been used for whatever is next. This is probably not a healthy attitude, as I know that I miss a lot the first time through, but the only thing I can see changing this would be the early onset of Alzheimer's or if I start drinking as much as when I was in college. (Note: the odds of both are not as bad as you might think). Street Fighter and music games are the only exceptions, though even Rock Band doesn't really count. I buy some new songs, play through them once or twice, then never look at them again. Perhaps this is some sort of unconscious pay back for the years of my childhood when all I had were one or two Atari or NES games and had to milk them for everything they were worth. I can have a new game every week now, sometimes two. Yes, it does make me sound a bit like a Tiger Woods of electronic entertainment. Only unlike Tiger's predicament White Knight Chronicles isn't going to beat the snot out of me with a broad sword when it finds me cheating with Lego Indiana Jones II.

3 comments:

I could definitely see myself playing certain games over and over again... especially when there's awesome stuff to unlock (bayonetta), vastly different ways to play the game (demon's souls, deus ex), sweet new game+ rewards (Demon's souls, chrono trigger, eternal darkness), or games that were just plain fun (metal gear solid). Maybe its because you play so many shitty games, that you can't imagine replaying any of them again!

By the way: I'm getting super street fight 4 for (most likely) the ps3. Can I count on fighting your blanka?

I'm trying to convince SlayerVin to play too, but he has to fix his stick and he's tied up with starcraft2. I'll remind him of the days of yore and hopefully he'll heed the call of new lobbies and pink t-hawk.

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This blog, in its present form, is a way to force me to not game away all my free time every day in the only way I know how: talk about it instead. Also, I play a lot of crap; read about it here so you don't have to. And if the complaining starts to get out of hand, leave anonymous, hateful comments.